A paradigm is the consensus of the scientific community,
"solutions to concrete problems that the profession has come to accept"
(Hoyningen-Huene, 1993, p.134).

Thomas Kuhn coined the term paradigm. He outlined it in terms of the
scientific process. Kuhn felt that "one sense of paradigm is global,
embracing all the shared commitments of a scientific group; the other sense
isolates a particularly important sort of commitment and is thus a subset of
the first"(Hoyningen-Huene, 1993, p.134). The concept of paradigm has
two general levels. The first is the all-encompassing whole, the summation of
the parts. It consists of the theories, laws, rules, models, concepts, and
definitions that go into a generally accepted fundamental theory of science.
Such a paradigm is "global" in character. On another level, a paradigm can
also be any one of these laws, theories, or models that combine to formulate a
global paradigm. These have the property of being "local." For example,
Galileo's theory that the earth rotated around the sun became a paradigm in
itself, a generally accepted law in astronomy. Yet, on the other hand, his
theory combined with other "local" paradigms in areas such as religion and
politics to transform culture.